The History and Culture of Pakistan (2059): Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, in the style and at the standard of the examination. They are not reproduced past-paper questions — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board, since genuine board material is the most reliable guide to exact question phrasing and mark scheme wording for your specific examination series.

Related: The History and Culture of Pakistan revision notes

Questions 5 and 6 below give extra practice on Sections 1.2 and 1.3 respectively, alongside the 1.1-focused questions above, so that all three sections of Paper 1 have worked practice questions to build a complete revision set from.

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Section A

Section A tests quick, precise recall — short-answer questions worth relatively few marks each, designed to be completed efficiently before moving on to Section B’s longer judgement questions.

1. Identify two internal factors and two external factors that contributed to the decline of the Mughal Empire. [4]

2. State the year the All-India Muslim League was founded. [1]

Section B

3. “The decline of the Mughal Empire was caused mainly by internal weakness rather than external pressure.” How far do you agree? [10]

4. Explain the importance of Shah Waliullah’s work in the religious revival of the subcontinent. [7]

5. Explain the significance of the founding of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. [7]

6. (Additional Section B practice) “The challenges facing Pakistan after 1947 were mainly economic rather than political.” How far do you agree? [10]

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Answers

1. Internal (any two): Aurangzeb’s policies (e.g. reversing tolerant policies, prolonged costly wars) [1] [1]; weak and incompetent successors after Aurangzeb, unable to hold the empire together [1] [1]. External (any two): foreign invasions weakening central authority [1] [1]; the East India Company’s growing political and economic expansion into Mughal territory [1] [1]. (Award any 4 of the above, one mark each.) A common mark lost here is offering three internal factors and only one external, when the question specifically asks for two of each.

2. 1906 [1]. A precise year is required — an approximate decade or “early 1900s” would not secure this mark on a recall question with only one mark available.

3. A strong answer explains internal factors in depth — Aurangzeb’s policies, weak successors, court intrigue and loss of central control [3] — and external factors in equal depth — foreign invasions and the East India Company’s expansion, which exploited the internal weakness already present [3] — before reaching a substantiated judgement: the strongest answers argue the two were interdependent, with internal weakness creating the conditions that allowed external pressure to succeed, rather than treating either as sufficient alone [4]. A weaker answer that only describes both sides without any final judgement is capped well below full marks, regardless of how detailed the description is.

4. Shah Waliullah’s significance should be explained through specific actions and their impact: his Persian translation of the Qur’an made scripture more accessible [2], his efforts sought to unify Muslims around a shared understanding of Islam at a time of political fragmentation [3], and his work laid groundwork that later reformers (such as Syed Ahmad Barelvi) built upon [2].

5. A strong answer explains the League’s significance beyond simply stating it was founded [1]: it gave Indian Muslims an organised political platform separate from the Indian National Congress for the first time [3], and its founding marks the beginning of a distinctly Muslim political movement that, over subsequent decades, developed into the demand for a separate state [3]. Simply stating the date and name without explaining why it mattered earns only the identification mark, not the significance marks that make up the bulk of this question.

6. A strong response weighs economic challenges — building infrastructure and institutions largely from scratch, managing a fragile new economy [3] — against political challenges — establishing stable government, integrating regions, and managing the transition of power [3] — before reaching a substantiated judgement about which weighed more heavily, with specific supporting evidence for the chosen side of the argument rather than an unsupported assertion [4]. As with Question 3, the judgement itself, not just the description of both sides, is where the highest band of marks sits.

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Where marks are usually lost

• Listing internal and external causes separately without explaining how they interacted.
• Naming a reformer or event without explaining why it mattered (significance, not just identification).
• “How far do you agree” answers that describe both sides but never reach an actual judgement.
• Confusing dates or figures from the emergence period (1.2) with the earlier background period (1.1).
• On Question 6-style judgement questions about the post-1947 period, describing challenges in general terms without distinguishing clearly between economic and political categories.
• Running out of time on Section B because Section A’s shorter, lower-mark questions were given disproportionate time.

Managing time across Section A and Section B

With Section A’s shorter questions worth relatively few marks and Section B carrying the higher-value judgement questions, time allocation should roughly track mark allocation rather than question count — spending equal time on a 1-mark and a 10-mark question is one of the most common, avoidable causes of underperformance on this paper. A useful discipline in practice is to allow roughly one minute of writing time per mark available, checking the clock at the end of each section rather than only once at the end of the whole paper.